Synchronization is critical to many aspects of distributed communications. In a multiway audio video conferencing session it is important to keep audio and video streams from all the participants in synch with each other as well as pay special attention to audio and video synchronization. In gaming applications it is important to synchronize clocks and multimedia data sent between the players, handicap players with faster connection so that everybody in the system plays in the common time frame.
It is highly desirable in the above applications to implement synchronization methods to fight with network imperfections such as jitter and other delays affecting the quality of audio and/or video stream due to increasing synch latency. The current invention addresses some of the toughest problems regarding synchronization in a multiway multimedia communication system. The examples of such a system can be in audio/video conferencing, live music concerts by remote musicians playing together over the Internet, as well as multi-player gaming.